Pauline Hanson was set to meet Nigel Farage this week. Given the saga engulfing the UK populist MP, she might be better served to jump on a flight back to Australia.
She and her chief adviser, James Ashby, are in London to meet Farage and others in the global populist-right ecosystem.
Barnaby Joyce was also enjoying himself in the British heatwave before returning this week. He said on Monday: “Nigel Farage, according to the polling, is about to become the prime minister of England. Pauline and One Nation are doing incredibly well, and I suppose they should be crossing notes.”
Two days later, before his meeting with Hanson, Farage pulled a move that has plunged his Reform UK party into its most perilous moment. He may not have time to meet with the One Nation leader.
Farage resigned from his seat of Clacton and prompted what he called the “people versus the establishment” byelection. The anti-immigration firebrand was under pressure over a $9.6 million donation from a crypto billionaire and gifts from a felon known as “Posh George”.
UK parliament is looking into the allegations. But Farage, recently returned from celebrating the US’s 250th anniversary with Donald Trump’s inner circle, wants a vote to prove that Brits support him against Westminster elites.
Opponents of the 62-year-old called his bluff and will not contest the byelection. Bizarrely, he could win the poll and be forced to another byelection should parliament suspend him and 10 per cent of Clacton voters sign a petition for another vote. His likely win may not save his credibility.
Details of the story matter less than what it signifies: the halo that seemed to be perched over Farage’s head has faded. In the early phase of his rise, which predated Hanson’s, mainstream right-wingers in the UK lamented Farage’s Teflon quality. Scandal after scandal seemed to do little to stop him as his charismatic outrage-machine crowded out opponents on social media.
Same goes for Hanson. Political gravity has not seemed to drag down One Nation’s leader even as the Queensland senator abused journalists and failed to follow disclosure rules on flights and gifts from mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.
That began to change when Hanson moved from the periphery to centre stage for the first time. Her performance at the National Press Club last month proved that Ashby, viewed as a masterful political operator in Canberra, can overreach like the rest of them.
Instead of moderating and acknowledging One Nation’s support was coming from all sorts of Australians, Hanson put forward an agenda to the right of many populist leaders.
Often, conservative disruptors offer generous social welfare and tax policies alongside hardline positions on migration. Not Hanson, who echoed Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding slash-and-burn approach. It took some months, but Trump eventually created distance from Musk.
Hanson has since dipped in the polls. She spent the last week in Canberra cleaning up her mess and explaining that she did, in fact, support paid parental leave.
All of this is to say that the normal rules of politics may still apply to the Anglosphere’s nationalists.
Hanson is at the start of her journey as a mainstream political threat. She has not yet confronted the inevitable infighting that will come as she recruits more MPs and candidates, as has occurred in Farage’s team. The UK media has had time to set its sights on Farage in a way the Australian media has not on Hanson.
Reform UK has lost about five percentage points of support as it has argued about its remigration policies, a concept referring to mass deportation of non-white immigrants. Hanson’s party has not adopted the radical concept of remigration, but online supporters of One Nation are pushing for such policies. Hanson herself admitted her branches were “infiltrated by extremists”.
The spivs with whom Farage has surrounded himself are like moths to a flame of populist parties. It will be difficult for One Nation to create systems to weed out problematic figures or avoid the temptation of taking the cash. Hanson’s bravado about a plane donated by Rinehart earlier this year stood in contrast to anxiety within One Nation about how the relationship with Rinehart could cause trouble for the party.
Farage’s antics and Hanson’s press club hiccups show that patience, not panic, should be the name of the game for the Coalition in its quest to claw back voters from One Nation.
Its underperforming leader, Angus Taylor, has a shorter three-year term than his more magnetic UK counterpart Kemi Badenoch. Both are scrambling to sketch out coherent but responsible conservative positions on energy and migration to convince right-wing voters that they, like Hanson and Farage, want to create real change.
Time might just be their friend.
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Paul Sakkal is Chief Political Correspondent. He previously covered Victorian politics and won a Walkley award and the 2025 Press Gallery Journalist of the Year. Contact him securely on Signal @paulsakkal.14.Connect via X or email.
